


A New Year

by Eglantine



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Backstory, Bini, Canon Era, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Making Friends, Roommates, magnetism (literally), maybe some unresolved sexual tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-11
Updated: 2014-12-11
Packaged: 2018-03-01 02:42:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2756567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eglantine/pseuds/Eglantine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One cold winter, Bossuet stays with Joly for the first time. They both have things they hope to learn about each other in the process. </p><p>Or, even soulmate/best friends have to start out somewhere.</p><p>Or, Joly and Bossuet come to realize that they're both basically weirdos. </p><p>Or, a story of attempting to make friends while suffering from congenital sarcasm. </p><p>(Not slash in the sense that nothing actually happens. But it's probably there if you'd like it to be.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	A New Year

I. Bedfellows

 

It was a cold winter, just freezing— _bloody freezing_ , as they’d say in the sort of English novels Bossuet was then making a bit of money translating. A very little bit of money, and not enough to quite afford a room of his own, or at least not a room he could be certain he wouldn’t freeze in, and so he had finally taken up Joly’s offer of a spare mattress.

 

Joly had been offering since shortly after they met earlier that autumn, and Bossuet had been resisting—not because he didn’t like Joly, because he did. They’d gotten on instantly. And though he’d come to realize that this was hardly remarkable for either of them, speaking only for himself (it was a subject which demanded some modicum of sincerity, and therefore one he had not broached with Joly) there was something more in the liking than the usual friendliness he felt towards just about everyone he met. They and others had coalesced into something of a group the past few months, but he found he liked Joly quite the best. He felt they understood each other in some unnamable way.

 

But still he avoided taking up the offer, in large part because Joly was so terribly nice. When he stayed with Courfeyrac (whom he had known longer, anyway), he could rest easy knowing that Courfeyrac would not hesitate to throw him out when and if his presence became an inconvenience. Likewise with Bahorel. But Bossuet rather feared that Joly would never be able to bring himself to do so, no matter how troublesome Bossuet’s presence. Bossuet had no compunction about making use of his friends’ generosity, but he did not like to incur debts he had no hope of paying and he did not like to cause more than an amusing level of annoyance. But Bahorel and Courfeyrac were having a rare moment of simultaneous luck in love, and so Bossuet had been left at last with no choice. Joly seemed genuinely pleased by the idea, so that at least helped ease Bossuet’s mind.

 

“Oh, you’re tidier than I thought,” he said as they stepped through the door, which was also when he realized that the brandy he’d thrown back ‘for warmth’ on the walk over was perhaps affecting him more than he’d realized.

 

“I don’t know that tidiness is something one can guess like that,” Joly mused, and this was another reason Bossuet liked him, his unhesitating willingness to leap onto any thread of conversation.

 

“Take Combeferre, after all,” he went on. “One would expect him to be—”

 

“Fastidious. Utterly.”

 

“But that is, in fact, not the case. I think his thoughts are so perfectly ordered, it leaves him no energy for applying a similar diligence to physical objects. His flat looks like a library exploded.”

 

Bossuet laughed. “Very well, the point is yours and I apologize.”

 

“Oh, no need for that.” All this while, Joly had been tending to the fire, and now he stood and brushed off his hands. “I think we would do well to get some sleep. Now, there is, as promised, a spare mattress—but if we share, we can both make use of both blankets.”

 

“Then let us share, by all means—if you don’t mind, that is,” he added quickly.

 

“Oh, not in the least. Four children in a rather small house—I was sharing a bed until my older brothers got married. I sleep better, I think. And,” he added with that particular tone of cheerfulness that Bossuet knew by now heralded something truly morbid, “—should one die suddenly in one’s sleep, at least there will be someone close to hand.”

 

“I should think I would be equally effective in disposing of your corpse whether or not I’m sleeping at your side.”

 

“Well, yes, perhaps,” Joly conceded. “But perhaps the event—whatever it was—would wake you, and you could provide aid.”

 

“Not that I would know what aid to provide.”

 

“Oh, I’m certain something would occur to you,” he said brightly.

 

Bossuet couldn’t help but laugh. “You’re a mad little bird, aren’t you.”

 

“Why a bird?”

 

“Well, you must be a bird if you have wings. Even four of them.”

 

“A very good point. So, what sort of bird? Not an eagle, surely.”

 

Bossuet laughed again, and Joly grinned. “No, you’ve more of an owlish look about you. But one kind enough to let an eagle share his nest.”

 

“Truly,” Joly said. “You needn’t mention it. It’s my pleasure.”

 

Joly was rather more fastidious of dress than Bossuet (not that this was hard to be), and so while carefully unknotted his cravat and smoothed out his trousers, Bossuet had already ensconced himself in the blankets and was reflecting on his good fortune. He should have guessed, he thought, that someone with Joly’s hypochondriacal tendencies would have splendidly warm blankets.

 

“This is my first winter in Paris, you know,” Joly said as he dove into the bed beside Bossuet and pulled the covers up to his chin. “It doesn’t get much worse, does it?”

 

“This is unusual enough,” Bossuet said. “Goodness only knows what will happen from here. Perhaps the Seine will freeze. Where godforsaken southern backwater are you from, again?”

 

“I’m from Marseille, thank you very much,” he sniffed. “It’s hardly a backwater. But I confess it leaves me rather ill-prepared for a proper winter. I’m doubly doomed.”

 

“How doubly? You may as well know now that I’m terribly nosy, and now that I have you trapped here, I intend to take full advantage.”

 

“I’ve no secrets,” he said, laughing. “One’s family is just hardly the sort of thing that comes up with our set. But if you wish to know, my father met my mother when he was a soldier in Egypt, and contrary to stereotype kept his promises to her—so with Mediterranean from one side and Egyptian from the other, I am quite entirely bred for the warm. It’s the reason for my poor health, I’m certain of it. I require a more southern climate for my blood to flow properly. It’s why my hands are always so cold, feel—”

 

“Oh, I feel them.”

 

“Perhaps I’ll go to Egypt someday to prove it.”

 

“So that’s how you got so dark,” Bossuet said thoughtfully.

 

“Whereas _you_ ,” Joly said, “to the surprise of absolutely no one, have a by-the-book sanguine complexion.”

 

Bossuet shifted to get a better look at Joly’s face. Spectacles removed, Joly squinted back. He had a round, boyish face, Joly did, big brown eyes that, up close, looked almost pale contrasted with his thick, dark lashes and jet black hair. Bossuet’s own complexion, as Joly had said, was ruddy and his hair— where it had not yet beaten a retreat from the top of his head—was reddish too. It seemed to him his short, stocky frame was like a rough, floridly painted woodcut to Joly’s thin, fine pen-and-ink. But they did fit, didn’t they, he thought, in this little bed.

 

He realized he was staring and quickly rolled onto his back.

 

“So, go on then,” he said, staring up at the ceiling rather than at Joly. “Four of you. Tell me about them.”

 

“You never stop wanting to talk, do you. Some of us actually attend our morning lectures, you know,” Joly said, sounding amused.

 

“Do they! Why on earth would one do that?”

 

Joly sighed heavily, but Bossuet had a feeling even without looking that he was smiling.

 

“I’ve spent so much time sleeping in lectures, you see,” Bossuet said. “I think I need the sound of someone’s voice to lull me to sleep.”

 

“Well, you’ve chosen wisely then. There are few things less interesting than my family. Let me see… my oldest brother followed my father into the army. My second brother has married into a rather well-to-do shipping family and has become terribly bourgeois and stuffy. And the last, Pierre, he’s learning law like you—well not like you, he’s actually learning it—and now he’s a clerk back home.”

 

“And you the youngest.”

 

“Shall I just write my life story out for you? No, not exactly. Pierre and I are twins. I’m the older, as it happens.”

 

“A twin!” Bossuet cried. “You see! I knew nothing of you before. You cannot possibly be friends with a man and not know something like that about him. Now we can be friends properly.”

 

“Well, thank goodness for that.”

 

“Monsieur Joly,” Bossuet said, mock-scandalized, “are you being glib?”

 

“No! No, truly—though you aren’t exactly one to criticize if I were.”

 

“Nonsense,” he scoffed. “I am always entirely sincere.”

 

Joly snorted. Then, after a few moments’ silence, he prompted, “Well? What of you?”

 

“Nothing of me,” Bossuet said, eyes back toward the ceiling. “Only son, parents both deceased. An uncharacteristically brief story for me, I know. It’s why I really must marry into some complicated foreign family at once.”

 

“Oh, that’s your aim, is it?”

 

“It couldn’t hurt, certainly.”

 

“Sanguine,” Joly said knowingly. He smiled a little and went on, quieter, as if half to himself. “Natural proof against melancholia. Not that one needs to look to humors to see that in you.”

 

“If you start in on blood and bile, I really will fall asleep,” Bossuet said.

 

“I thought that talk of my family was meant to put you to sleep.” Joly grinned and nudged Bossuet with an elbow. “You could have just asked, if you were curious.”

 

“No, no, I daren’t indulge curiosity. It’s proverbially fatal, and with my luck…”

 

“Oh, do hush up and go to sleep, won’t you?”

 

 

 

 

II. Murmur

 

In Bossuet’s dream, an insurrection had begun and Enjolras shouted orders from one side while Courfeyrac shouted different ones from the other, and Bossuet couldn’t hear either of them because someone was thumping out a not-quite-rhythmic beat on a drum that rang in his ears and vibrated, it seemed, through his bones.

 

He woke, suddenly, without knowing quite why, and he realized first off that he could still hear the drumbeat. He realized next that he had somehow sprawled himself on top of Joly in his sleep, his head nestled against Joly’s chest. So the drumbeat, then, must have been his heart.

 

One of Joly’s hands was resting gently on Bossuet’s head, his thumb absently but steadily stroking his temple, which was how Bossuet realized (the final discovery of his bleary ascent into wakefulness) that Joly was awake too.

 

“You’re awake,” Bossuet said, which was the best his still sleep-blurred mind could manage.

 

“You are too,” Joly replied.

 

“Your heart—”

 

“Yes,” Joly said. “It has a funny beat. Sometimes I lie awake and listen to it and think about how very little we know about our bodies. The heart keeps us alive, but we have next to no notion of why yours beats true and mine does not—far less how to _fix_ it. And if we cannot understand our bodies and fix them, how are we ever to know and mend our _minds_? And what will our beliefs come to if we cannot convince others to believe them too?”

 

Bossuet had no idea how to respond to this. It was an ongoing joke, of course, to tease Joly for his entirely outsized reactions to even the most minor medical incidents (real or imagined), but Bossuet didn’t feel he could laugh at this. He didn’t want to. But before he could trouble himself too much in seeking an appropriate answer, Joly said suddenly, “The poles.”

 

The response to this, luckily, was clear: “—what?”

 

“The bed. That’s why we can’t sleep—”

 

“Actually, I _was_ asleep—”

 

Joly, ignoring him completely, concluded, “The bed is out of alignment. We have to shift it.”

 

“Why?”

 

“It’s a question of magnetism, it’s rather complex and more importantly, I know you don’t actually care.” Joly had plucked his spectacles off the end table and put them on, and was now rummaging around in the little drawer beneath it. “Just get out of the bed.”

 

“What?” Bossuet yelped. “Not on your life. We’ll freeze to death.”

 

“It takes far longer to freeze to death than this will take,” Joly said patiently.

 

“And you know that to the minute, I’m sure,” Bossuet muttered, not budging an inch. Joly found what he was looking for and sat back, legs crossed, on top of the blankets, staring intently at something cupped in his hands. “Is that a _compass?_ ”

 

“Yes,” Joly said, as if this were the most obvious thing in the world. Bossuet wondered if he was perhaps still dreaming.

 

After a few moments, Joly hopped decisively out of the bed. Bossuet groaned just at the sight of it, at the thought of emerging from the warm cocoon of blankets they’d made.

 

“Right,” Joly said. “It’s become tilted. We must realign it. Get out and help me, will you? This end needs to go to the left…”

 

Bossuet closed his eyes, just for one more second, then forced himself to stand. The cold night air was precisely as awful as he’d feared, and he immediately began bouncing from foot to foot in an effort to keep warm. Joly rolled his eyes and pushed him towards the head of the bed, then moved himself towards the foot.

  
“Now. You go left.”

 

“Are we lining it up against the wall?”

 

“No… it’s a bit… no, more. No, less. No—”

 

“I’m going to bloody murder you.”

 

“Did you just curse at me in English?”

 

The first time they set the bed down, Bossuet naturally managed to set it on his own foot. But eventually this crisis was resolved, the bed straightened to the appropriate degree of crookedness, and both burrowed back into the warmth of the bed. Somehow when both were settled, Bossuet found himself with his head resting once again on Joly’s chest, and neither of them said anything.

 

“So?” Bossuet said. “Did that help?”

 

“Well, one can’t expect to feel it suddenly,” Joly said sagely. “It’s a very subtle effect.” 

 

“Of course,” he replied, hoping that Joly couldn’t see him smile. He could feel Joly relaxing, his breathing growing deep and steady, and his heart fluttering on. Subtle, indeed.

 

 

 

III. Praenomen  

 

Not long after the new year, Bossuet found himself with a nasty cold. This, he concluded, would be pressing hospitality one step too far. He could only imagine the fits of valetudinarian panic into which Joly would be sent by the sight of his sniffling, coughing self on his doorstep. So he discreetly absented himself, a plan which led to an unprecedented attendance record of three days in a row, as the lecture halls were someplace warm and dry where he could unobtrusively sleep in the corner. And for the first two nights, he caroused with Grantaire until they both fell asleep. But on the third night, Grantaire wanted to go to the Corinthe—not out of any newfound political fervor, but for the precise reason Bossuet did not wish to go: to see their friends. Ultimately, however, he relented, when Grantaire pointed out that after a few days away, their friends would be newly willing to buy them drinks.

 

So to the Corinthe they went. By this point Bossuet was feeling entirely unequal to either politics or the rapid-fire wit of his friends, but it luckily proved to be a particularly populous meeting, and he easily slipped into an awkward corner near the fire where he was mostly obscured from the view of the room by a gaggle of students he didn’t know well and who seemed to be arguing about a play they’d all seen. He let the sound of their arguments, if not quite the sense, wash over him and wondered if falling asleep would draw attention.

 

Joly suddenly appeared in the seat opposite—so suddenly, in fact, Bossuet wondered if he really had fallen asleep for a moment. Joly held a cup of something steaming between his hands, which he pushed across the table towards Bossuet.

 

“Mulled wine,” he said in response to Bossuet’s quizzical expression. “You look rather like you could use it.”

 

Bossuet felt Joly watching him as he took a sip (and oh, the warmth and spices seemed to coarse straight through his veins)— biding his time, he was certain, and sure enough, as soon as Bossuet had set the cup down, Joly said, “Where on earth have you been?”

 

“As I’ve been unwell, I thought—” Here he broke off into a fit of coughing which elicited a pained sort of sound from Joly, one Bossuet imagined to be  a mixture of sympathy and nervous dismay. “As I know the care you take with your health, I thought I’d better not trouble you, in case it should prove catching.”

 

“Trouble me?” he echoed.

 

“Oh, you know. Given the panic into which the threat of illness has been known to send you, I didn’t want to be the cause—”

 

“Do you really think so little of our friendship? Of my affection for you?”

 

Poised to laugh, Bossuet realized upon a second glance at Joly’s face that he wasn’t, in fact, being melodramatic for effect. He looked genuinely wounded, his thin arms folded across his chest not in anger but tightly, as if to hold something in. Bossuet felt his cheeks grow hot and he wanted to look away, but Joly’s steady gaze did not seem to permit it.

 

“This would be the moment for a well-timed sneeze,” he said at last. “But alas, even my illnesses betray me.”

 

“Well, I’m sorry for whatever I’ve done to make you think that I would be similarly disloyal.”

 

“Not _disloyal_ …” But that was, he had to concede at least mentally, precisely what he had implied, suggesting that Joly’s self interest would so far outweigh concern for a friend. He took another sip of wine to avoid having to elaborate.

 

“If I may offer a diagnosis?” Joly said, and Bossuet nodded over the rim of the cup. “After a month of living with you, and nearly four of knowing you, this is my conclusion: you, in addition to your congenital cheerfulness, have a profound aversion to being a bother. I do not question your natural optimism—which, incidentally, I’m terribly envious of—but rather the degree to which you seem to have decided that is the only thing people like you for. You do not wish to trouble anyone with difficult things—or at least, nothing more extreme than radical politics and difficult puns. You’ve learned a joking way to accept our help in matters of money—”

 

“I repay my debts,” Bossuet broke in, setting the cup down. Then he sneezed before adding, “—when I can.”

 

“Yes,” Joly said, not offering the smile Bossuet had hoped that comment would provoke. “I know. But that’s not—you are not a bother to me. If you say things that trouble me, or that trouble or sadden _you,_ I won’t like your company less. If you have an awful cold—and truly, my dear, you sound ghastly, you do—then I will still be here to help you, and still be your friend, even if you temporarily lack the voice for orations and the quickness for puns.”

 

Bossuet still clutched the warm cup between both his hands. Joly reached across the table and laid his own hands on top of Bossuet’s, a gesture which all but forced Bossuet to lift his gaze from the wine and meet Joly’s eyes.

 

“I like you much better than you seem to think I do,” he said.

 

Bossuet’s throat felt tight.

 

“Upon the least occasion more, my eyes will tell tales of me,” he mumbled hoarsely, knowing Joly would understand neither the English nor the reference.

 

“And how does someone who can’t even sit through a single law lecture learn English, anyway?” Joly asked with a sigh. Bossuet laughed, which triggered another fit of coughing, longer than before. When he caught his breath again, Joly stood up.

 

“Come,” he said. “We’re going home.”

 

When they’d made their way out into the street (Joly insisted on giving Bossuet his scarf and gloves, and walked with his arm tucked firmly around Bossuet’s shoulders) they proceeded much of the way without speaking. Bossuet was the one to break the silence at last.

 

“My father was a postmaster,” he said. He could feel Joly start slightly in surprise— though whether it was at his sudden speech or its contents, Bossuet wasn’t sure. But having begun, he pressed on anyway. “He ran the post office in Meaux, you know. So there were always people coming through. Foreigners too, lots of them— and lots of English, once the wars were done.” He paused to sneeze once, twice, three times, then continued thickly, “It will come as no surprise to hear that I rather preferred talking to them to my studies when I was a child, and I learned people quite like it when you can talk to them in their language a bit. So I picked up bits and pieces here and there, and as I said, lots of English. And doing translations has just helped me keep in practice with that one best, I suppose.”

 

A silence.

 

“—you asked how I learned English.”

 

“Yes.” He could hear the smile in Joly’s voice, though he couldn’t quite bring himself to look. “Yes, I did.”

 

Back at the flat, Joly bundled Bossuet in front of the fire and set about making some kind of tea or poultice or something that Bossuet couldn’t smell but could somehow _feel_ somewhere at the back of his throat. Being fussed over was making him feel petulant in a way that part of him still recognized was perfectly irrational, not to mention ungrateful.

 

“I don’t even know your first name, you know,” Bossuet complained.

 

Joly turned from the stove, bewildered. “What?”

 

“Your first name. The one that your parents called you to differentiate from the three other Joly sons.”

 

“…are you feverish?” He set his ladle aside and climbed up onto the sofa next to Bossuet, reaching out to feel his forehead.

 

“No, I’m making a point.”

 

“And what point is that?” Satisfied that Bossuet was not ranting in a feverish delirium, Joly seemed content to remain where he was, stroking Bossuet’s forehead in a gesture that would have smoothed his hair away from his brow if he had any hair to smooth. Joly’s cold hand was soothing, though, against his aching head and for a moment this lulled him into silence. He slumped down, bringing his head to rest against Joly’s shoulder. Then he remembered himself, though he could not quite remember his point, if he had ever actually had one.

  
“The point… the point is that I don’t know your first name.”

 

“It’s Anatole.” Joly slid his fingers round to massage Bossuet’s temple.

 

“—are you just endeavoring to emphasize what a damned idiot I was for avoiding you for three days?”

 

“Yes,” Joly said placidly. “What’s your first name?”

 

“David-Marie. Generally shortened to David. –by my father,” he added deliberately. “About whom I am perfectly content to speak, but—well, you’re right, I suppose. It seems… unsporting. That after you tell a perfectly nice story about your uncommonly loyal father and your exotic mother and your nice, prosperous brothers, I should spoil it by telling how I never knew my mother and my father died when I was sixteen years old and I have spent the years since managing to lose the entirety of what he left me. And you see—?” He sat up. “Then you look at me with that face and I know I will have no chance of making you believe that it truly doesn’t trouble me—it _doesn’t_ — certainly not the inheritance part, anyway— and then you shall think from now on that, given all that, there surely must be something false at the bottom of all my good humor and— ugh, can I have—”

 

Joly passed him a handkerchief and he blew his nose loudly. Joly seized the chance to cut in.

 

“But I do believe you.”

 

Handkerchief still pressed to his nose, Bossuet just blinked. “—oh.”

 

“But I do not believe that you are some… marvel, who trips through life and never experiences even a moment of melancholy or frustration or loneliness or—or anything except for a constant state of somewhat sarcastic goodwill. You are an idealist at heart, after all. I know you can see wrongs in the world, and feel for them. So you must occasionally feel for yourself, too.”

 

Bossuet shrugged and scrubbed pointlessly at his nose with the handkerchief. The worst feeling of all of it, he thought, was feeling lost for words. Oh, he could think of plenty of things to say, but he knew none of it would be what he meant, it would just be a great long stream to buffet away the heart of the matter.

 

He dropped his forehead back down to Joly’s shoulder, his face hidden against Joly’s sleeve. Joly brushed his fingers gently against Bossuet’s cheek, then leaned down and kissed the top of his head. Bossuet laughed.

 

“I have nothing to confess now,” he said, voice muffled by Joly’s sleeve. “I am feeling quite uncharacteristically lucky.”

 

 

 

IV. Windfall

 

Joly stopped dead in the doorway to his flat. Bossuet could not entirely blame him for this reaction. The flat was, after all, rather conspicuously filled with food. There was, to start, more wine than two people could possibly need, all lined up along the table. It was flanked by absolute mounds of cheese and pastry and other things, a quite literal feast. Bossuet beamed.

 

“—what,” Joly managed at last.

 

“You see before you the fruits of all my wealth. I have a great aunt who occasionally remembers that I exist, and decides to prove it by sending money. And so…” He gestured with a flourish towards the table.

 

“You spent it all on food and wine?” Joly said with palpable dismay. Bossuet’s smile faltered slightly, but he quickly recovered himself.

 

“Well, last time I spent it on women, so I thought it was uncommonly generous of me.”

 

“You could have spent it on your class fees, on a new _coat_ , on your credit at the Corinthe or the Musain or a hundred other places, on—”

 

“—on my own room?”

 

Joly stopped short. “No, don’t be silly. You live here. –and if you say that this is out of some sense of debt, I swear, I shall beat you with my cane.”

 

“Not debt, no. But if you’re allowed to do a kindness for me, I should be allowed to do one for you.”

 

“…I don’t know if tempting me to drink all that wine can strictly be called a kindness.”

 

Taking this as a concession of defeat, Bossuet grinned and beckoned Joly nearer. Joly sighed and shrugged off his overcoat, then came to stand at Bossuet’s side. They surveyed the food and drink, Bossuet with delight, Joly with something like resignation.

 

“You know, at first I was afraid you would be too polite to ever throw me out if you got tired of me,” Bossuet said as he surveyed the wine, trying to decide where to begin. “Now I realize I put far too much stock in your mildness.”

 

“Oh, I could never throw you out, but it isn’t mildness. I’m a creature of habit, you see. Now that you’re here, you’ll just have to stay, I’m afraid. I’ve grown used to you. Plus, you’re very useful when the bed needs realigning.”

 

Bossuet burst out laughing. “That’s the best you can come up with?”

 

“I was only trying to be sensitive to your allergy to sincerity,” Joly said primly.

 

“Well, let’s get started on this wine. Maybe it’ll be enough to cure me.”

 

Bossuet reached for the nearest bottle, but Joly seized his hand before he could reach it. Bossuet turned to him, confused.

 

“Thank you. For the food. And for helping move the bed. And for—I don’t know what for, but—thank you.”

 

Bossuet laughed, raised Joly’s hand, and kissed it. “And thank you, _mon joli._ For I don’t know what.”


End file.
